Helen Dyer, our correspondent from Down Under, forwards this. It is part of a letter (much longer) by her friend Graham to his New South Wales Senator:

According to the late Sir Harry Gibbs, former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, in his address, "The Erosion of National Sovereignty”, this acceleration in signing of international treaties coincided with a fundamental change in society characterised by an abandonment in personal responsibility and an obsession with individual rights:

"The flood of treaties began to flow strongly in the 1960s. That was the time when the transformation of culture – some would say its disintegration – which the wars had set in train began to accelerate. One aspect of the change in society that then occurred was the tendency to insist on individual rights and to indulge individual wishes, without at the same time recognizing the co-relative obligations of individuals to society. The treaties that were made were in tune with this sentiment and some of them reflected the ideas that became regarded as politically correct. They covered a field including Civil and Political Rights, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Refugees, Torture, the Rights of the Child and The Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women as well as the protection of the Environment. There is hardly an area of governmental activity which these treaties do not touch......”


As Sir Harry Gibbs emphasises, "A nation is not sovereign unless it is independent from control from outside its own borders”:

"It has been frankly said, by supporters of the system, that the promotion and protection of human rights is a modern tool of revolution. That revolution has already been successful in Australia. We already have laws that have created new rights at the expense of rights that we took for granted. We should not allow a revolution that affects us to be under the control of others. There is no good reason to allow rules that govern the rights of individuals and shape the nature of society to be interpreted by foreign bodies which have plainly shown an intention to give effect to their own modish notions………A nation is not sovereign unless it is independent from control from outside its own borders. In practice we have lost some of that independence. This erosion of our sovereignty was our own Doing.........Whether future Parliaments will prevent the further erosion of our national sovereignty must be regarded as doubtful, having regard to the difficulty which even the wisest of men and women find in trying to free themselves from the prejudices of the times.”


Many nations are however in the view of the UN, slowing down the global governance goals of the UN by surrendering national sovereignty too slowly.

As the United Nations points out in their report, "Global Governance and Global Rules for Development in the Post-2015 Era, the success of their post-2015 agenda is at stake. Countries must surrender sovereignty to the UN if the UN is to have the power to deal with global problems.


"For the United Nations to utilize its distinct advantages, it must strengthen its position in global governance……Implementation of the post-2015 development agenda ulti­mately depends on the political will of Member States to carry it through. Therefore, success will depend on whether all countries contribute to the reform of global governance and use their policy space to implement poli­cies that promote the three dimensions of sustainable development in an integrated manner. However, national States have tended to commit them­selves to those solutions that are in their narrow national interest or do not interfere with what they perceive as their national sovereignty, and/ or those from which they are expecting to maximize their national inter­est at the expense of others, either by domination or by free-riding (Kaul, 2013). While global challenges continue to be viewed from this narrow perspective, the probability of failing to address them will remain high. The need for responsible sovereignty, one of the five principles presented in Section II above, is more than relevant in this context. In this regard, ECOSOC should take an initiative on how to operationalize this prin­ciple. Responsible sovereignty is, no doubt, a necessary condition for States to cooperate in creating the conditions for the realization of internation­ally recognized rights and freedoms and to act according to the other key principles of global governance put forward in this report: common but differentiated responsibilities, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability and coherence. Likewise, the relevance of the United Nations in global economic governance largely depends on how much Member States are willing to strengthen the Organization, so that it may become a more ef­fective factor in global economic governance for implementing a post-2015 development agenda for the benefit of all.”

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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